The Legend of Clyde Torrey (multimedia)

The Legend of Clyde Torrey

There are many memorable Swan’s Islanders who have passed on, but none so legendary as Clyde Torrey. Clyde was a farmer and a musician and a friend. He was eccentric and often did things differently. He died in 1974. Sonny Sprague remembers Clyde’s music and his friendship.

This piece was produced as an audio piece as part of the Swan’s Island Memory Project, a series of audio documentaries based on oral histories of residents of Swan’s Island, Maine. It appeared in a presentation of “Swan’s Islanders at Play” in July 2010, and has aired on WERU. The Swan’s Island Memory project was created to rebuild the island’s connection to history in the wake of losing their historical collection to a fire in 2008. It was created as a multimedia piece by Meghan Vigeant in 2014 for a presentation of a Musical History of Swan’s Island at the Island Institute.